Council approves pay cuts, changes

Union accepts deal, averts layoffs

Overview

Background: Escondido faces a $7.4 million budget deficit this fiscal year, which it has been trying to close with service reductions and employee salary and benefit cuts. When the city's largest nonuniformed labor union refused to negotiate, the city manager recommended 31 layoffs.

What's changed: Tuesday, the Escondido City Employees Association agreed to salary and benefit cuts, with a promise from the city that no one will be laid off for six months. The City Council adopted wide-ranging budget cuts Wednesday.

The future: The pay of City Hall will be reduced 5 percent; City Hall will be closed on Fridays; libraries will open fewer hours; 12 positions in the Police Department will be left open; Fire Station 6 on Del Dios Road will not be equipped with a firetruck. More cuts are coming.

ESCONDIDO 
The morning after Shirley Russell took a 5 percent pay cut to help her employer, the city of Escondido, close a $7.4 million budget gap, she ran through a list of things she'll have to consider giving up to make ends meet.

Cable TV, her home phone and Internet connection, vacations. She will have to figure out what to eliminate as her $38,000 annual income shrinks to $36,000.

“I am a single person who has to depend totally on my income to survive,” said Russell, 56, a customer service representative at City Hall. “This makes it almost impossible to make a house payment.

“I had planned on retiring in 3½ years – we do get tired. The earliest I can do that now is in 8½ years.”

Russell's pay reduction, effective at the end of the month, was part of a package of wide-ranging budget cuts that the City Council adopted on a 3-2 vote Wednesday.

The cuts included a 5 percent salary reduction for City Hall's 236 employees, including the city manager, and eliminating the city's contributions to all employee 401(k)s and automatic pay raises.

City Hall will be closed every Friday, instead of every other Friday, beginning Jan. 30, and library hours will be dramatically shortened, beginning March 1.

In addition, the council decided not fill six open police officers'positions, as well as six that were frozen at the beginning of the budget year, and not to equip Fire Station 6 with a firetruck.

Layoffs that the city manager had proposed were averted, however, by a last-minute decision by Russell's union to accept pay and benefit cuts. For that, union members got a thank you from each council member.

The union, the Escondido City Employees Association, is the largest nonuniformed labor organization in the city.

When asked by the city manager last fall to consider salary and benefit reductions, the union initially refused. Its members had signed a new contract in October.

Union leaders argued that their members were some of the lowest-paid workers in the city, and that it was unfair for them to bear the brunt of cuts.

They also questioned why police officers, firefighters and maintenance workers were asked only for benefit reductions. The council's budget subcommittee, however, had directed the city manager to preserve public safety and the city's infrastructure.

City Manager Clay Phillips recommended 31 layoffs, 28 of which would come from the union's rank-and-file, if it refused to renegotiate its contract.

Union members buckled Tuesday night, voting to accept the cuts less than 24 hours before the council was scheduled to approve layoffs. The city promised there would be no layoffs until the association's contract is renegotiated in July.

Councilwomen Marie Waldron and Olga Diaz rejected the package. Waldron said she was concerned the cuts in the police department were too deep.

Diaz proposed using $215,000 from the city's dwindling reserve fund, which is now about $7 million, to keep libraries open longer this fiscal year, but she got no support from her colleagues.

“The money is taxpayers' money for taxpayers' services,” Diaz said after listening to pleas from people concerned about reducing library hours. “Now is a good time to use a portion of it for something so vital to our residents.”

Mayor Lori Holt Pfeiler said that while she loves libraries, she could not support special treatment for that department because other departments will want to use money from the reserve fund.

Some members of the audience hissed, but Pfeiler stood her ground.

More cuts are on the horizon. The measures the council approved are expected to save only about $2.8 million of the projected $7.4 million deficit this fiscal year. The city plans to use $3.3 million from the reserve fund and make $1.3 million more in cost reductions to make up the remaining $4.6 million, officials said.